Territorial Resilience: Toward a Proactive Meaning for Spatial Planning
Author(s): Grazia Brunetta, Rosario Ceravolo, Carlo Alberto Barbieri, Alberto Borghini, Francesco de Carlo, Alfredo Mela, Silvia Beltramo, Andrea Longhi, Giulia De Lucia, Stefano Ferraris, Alessandro Pezzoli, Carlotta Quagliolo, Stefano Salata, Angioletta Voghera
More info: The international debate on resilience has grown around the ability of a community to prepare for and adapt to natural disasters, with a growing interest in holistically understanding complex systems. Although the concept of resilience has been investigated from different perspectives, the lack of understanding of its conceptual comprehensive aspects presents strong limitations for spatial planning and for the adoption of policies and programs for its measurement and achievement. In this paper, we refer to “territorial resilience” as an emerging concept capable of aiding the decision-making process of identifying vulnerabilities and improving the transformation of socio-ecological and technological systems (SETSs). Here, we explore the epistemology of resilience, reviewing the origins and the evolution of this term, providing evidence on how this conceptual umbrella is used by different disciplines to tackle problem-solving that arises from disaster management and command-control practices to augment the robustness. Assuming the SETSs paradigm, the seismic and structural engineering, social sciences and history, urban planning and climatology perspectives intersects providing different analytical levels of resilience, including vulnerability and patrimony from a community and cultural perspective. We conclude that territorial resilience surpasses the analytical barriers between different disciplines, providing a useful concept related to complex problem-solving phenomena for land use planning, opening a new research question: how can territorial resilience be measured, acknowledging different units and levels of analysis aiding decision-making in spatial plans and projects? In attempting to understand a resilient system, quantitative and qualitative measurements are crucial to supporting planning decisions.
2019 | Journal Articles
Bridging the Gap: The Measure of Urban Resilience
Author(s): Grazia Brunetta, Alessandra Faggian, Ombretta Caldarice
More info: The concept of resilience has arisen as a “new way of thinking”. It was applied in planning at th...e end of the last century as a concept that encourages policies to face stress factors and react by renewing and innovating cities. Resilience becomes instrumental in addressing both causes and effects of significant global challenges. As it motivates the transformative potentials of cities, resilience is commonly named “co-evolutionary resilience” or, most recently, “transformative resilience”. Following this more profound meaning, resilience is not only the opposite of vulnerability but also a “broad concept”, whose final purpose is to prevent and manage unforeseen events together with the improvement of the environmental and social quality of a territorial system. In a nutshell, this approach characterises resilience as a territorial systems’ capacity to respond systemically and dynamically to the present and future shocks related to significant global challenges through non-linear transformation processes. Such processes involve the natural and anthropic characteristics of a territorial system, their performance, quality, and functions. Although the theoretical debate on resilience is deeply investigated, several methodological challenges remain mainly related to the concept’s practical sphere. As a matter of fact, resilience is commonly criticised for being too ambiguous and empty meaning. At the same time, turning resilience into practice is not easy to do. We need to measure resilience because its assessment allows consideration of what resilience is practical and what it is possible, and at which point resilience is realistically likely to fail. This will be arguably one of the most impactful global issues for future research on resilience.
The Special Issue “Bridging the Gap: The Measure of Urban Resilience” falls under this heading. To the best of our knowledge, it seeks to synthesise the state-of-the-art knowledge of theories and practices on measuring resilience. We were particularly interested in papers that address one or more of the following questions: “What are the theoretical perspectives of measuring urban resilience? How can urban resilience a property to be measured? What are the existing models and methods for measuring urban resilience? What are the main features that a technique for measuring urban resilience needs to guide proper adaptation and territorial governance? What is the role of measuring urban resilience in operationalising cities’ ability to adapt, recover and benefit from shocks?”
The Special Issue “Bridging the Gap: The Measure of Urban Resilience” falls under this heading. To the best of our knowledge, it seeks to synthesise the state-of-the-art knowledge of theories and practices on measuring resilience. We were particularly interested in papers that address one or more of the following questions: “What are the theoretical perspectives of measuring urban resilience? How can urban resilience a property to be measured? What are the existing models and methods for measuring urban resilience? What are the main features that a technique for measuring urban resilience needs to guide proper adaptation and territorial governance? What is the role of measuring urban resilience in operationalising cities’ ability to adapt, recover and benefit from shocks?”
2021 | Journal Articles
Customised risk assessment in manufacturing: A step towards the future of occupational safety management
Author(s): Lorenzo Comberti, Micaela Demichela
More info: Following the enforcement of the EEC Directive (1989), focused on the promotion of workers health and safety, several approaches have been developed in the last 30 years to assess the risks related to the different hazards in the work environment and to identify, based on this assessment process, measures and action to promote safety and to reduce the occupational accidents. These approaches generally are focused on the analysis of the working activity and neglect the influence of the worker characteristics involved, strongly limiting the effectiveness of the risk-based decision making. This has a particular relevance in manufacturing field, where workers are still widely employed in several tasks, despite an increasing processes automation. Within this paper an innovative approach to explicitly consider the individual characteristic of the workers within the risk assessment in the work environment is described. Integration of a Human Performance model within risk assessment process is thus proposed. The resulting method allowed the definition of a customized risk based both on the individual skill of the worker involved and on the characteristics of the work places The comparison between risk assessed with traditional method and the customized risk showed the relevant influence that the human performance may have on the risk level to which the workers are exposed to and consequently allowed the company to identify the need for technical and organisational prevention and protection measures not highlighted with the more traditional approach. This method was applied for validation to an assembly line of a heavy vehicles manufacturing plant. The impact on the risk assessment is here shown and discussed, while the results in terms of safety at the workplace are still in the phase of data collection and will be published in future work. This model represents a step into the future of safety as a precursor of a more general process of customization at the individual level that is ongoing in several branches from the precision and personalized medicine (Duarte and Spencer, 2016) to the individual financial and marketing methods (Matz and Netzer, 2017).
2022 | Journal Articles
Inside-outside park planning: A mathematical approach to assess and support the design of ecological connectivity between Protected Areas and the surrounding landscape
Author(s): Angioletta Voghera, Gabriella Negrini, Emma Paola Germana Salizzoni, Roberto Monaco, Ana Jacinta Soares
More info: An effective biodiversity conservation in Protected Areas (PAs) requires that they are seen as part of larger ecosystems and that the ecological connectivity is maintained beyond PA administrative boundaries. The study of ecological processes that link PAs to their surrounding landscapes is thus of great importance to understand which actions should be implemented to promote inside-outside ecological connectivity. In this paper, we used a system of indicators and a mathematical model (PANDORA model) to describe in a quantitative way the present and the foreseen ecological state of a Regional Nature Park (Parc Naturel Régional de la Montagne de Reims) and its surrounding area. The landscape ecological quality was assessed in terms of the capability of the system to transmit its biological energy all around its territory, thus highlighting the degree of ecological connectivity in landscapes situated both inside and outside the Park. The outcomes showed how the areas situated outside the Park are characterized by a less positive evolutionary trajectory with respect to those situated inside the Park. This is mainly due to urbanization processes that are taking place precisely outside the Parks' boundary. To avoid the risk of Park's “insularization”, the need and ways of developing integrated inside-outside planning and management policies, both by the Park Authority and external authorities, is highlighted. The mathematical approach presented here could be replicated also in other PAs, to sustain and address an integrated spatial planning of PAs and their context.
2020 | Journal Articles
The Green and Blue Infrastructure Projects in Spatial Planning as a Key Component for Adaptation to Climate Change
Author(s): Grazia Brunetta
More info: In recent decades, we have been witnessing on a planetary scale a weak or almost zero response capacity of the cities and territories to the events caused by the ongoing systemic dynamics of climate change. The significant effects of climate change are the result of the increasingly high temporal frequency of extreme natural phenomena and the greater vulnerability of soils, the result of the intense and growing dynamics of urbanization and the consequent fragmentation of natural environments. The process of fragmentation of natural environments due to anthropic causes is the primary cause of biodiversity loss, generating ecological losses and environmental and landscape challenges.
2023 | Book Section
Dynamic Models for Exploring the Resilience in Territorial Scenarios
Author(s): Vanessa Assumma, Marta Bottero, Giulia Datola, Elena De Angelis, Roberto Monaco
More info: The present paper focuses on the role covered by dynamic models as support for the decision-making process in the evaluation of policies and actions for increasing the resilience of cities and territories. In recent decades, urban resilience has been recognized as a dynamic and multidimensional phenomenon that characterizes urban and metropolitan area dynamics. Therefore, it may be considered a fundamental aspect of urban and territorial planning. The employment of quantitative methods, such as dynamic models, is useful for the prediction of the dynamic behavior of territories and of their resilience. The present work discusses the system dynamics model and the Lotka–Volterra cooperative systems and shows how these models can aid technicians in resilience assessment and also decision makers in the definition of policies and actions, especially if integrated in wide evaluation frameworks for urban resilience achievements. This paper aims to provide an epistemological perspective of the application of dynamic models in resilience assessment, underlying the possible contribution to this issue through the analysis of a real case study and methodological framework. The main objective of this work is to lay the basis for future compared applications of these two models to the same case study.
2020 | Journal Articles